Posts Tagged ‘Boris Yeltsin’

Twenty years ago, the U.S. government intervened in Russia’s election to put Boris Yeltsin in power.

Mark Ames, editor of the English-language eXile magazine in Moscow in the 1990s, explained all this in an interview with Abby Martin for The Empire Files.

He told how the Clinton administration managed his election campaign, and the International Monetary Fund pumped money into Russia to keep the Russian government going.

With the guidance of economists from Harvard University, Yeltsin sold off Russia’s national assets to foreign corporations and Russian individuals who became the oligarchs who dominate Russia today. With U.S. approval, he shut down the Russian parliament and concentrated power in his own hands. Independent journalists were murdered. Oligarchs took over the independent press.

The Russian people were reduced to a state of misery not seen since Stalin’s rule in the 1930s. The death rate soared and the birth rate fell. Eventually even the Russian stock market crashed.

Vladimir Putin was Yeltsin’s right-hand man. The U.S. government accepted him as a reliable successor to Yeltsin. But when Putin refused to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. turned against him.

I wrote in a previous post that Vladimir Putin is a killer. But every abuse of power by Putin was made possible by Yeltsin.

Boris Yeltsin in fact was more of a killer than Putin, but the American government didn’t care because he was willing to subordinate Russia’s national interests to the interests of American and other foreign corporations.

Thousands of Russians today attended the funeral of Boris Nemtsov, the brave Russian opposition leader who was gunned down Friday a short distance from the Kremlin.

Boris Nemtsov

But Mark Ames of PandoDaily, who lived in Moscow during the 1990s, recalled Nemtsov as a part of the Boris Yeltsin regime, which was just as corrupt and just as murderous as what came after. Nemtsov’s bogus reforms hid and facilitated corruption rather than hindering it, Ames wrote.

Unlike with the Vladimir Putin regime today, few American or European journalists or leaders back then cared about the dissolution of the Russian Duma, war against Chechnya or the murders of Russian journalists.

Yeltsin took the advice of Harvard economists and had good relations with the Clinton administration, and so the crimes and follies of his regime were overlooked—at least until the financial crash of 1998.

Of course Nemtsov’s murder is a serious matter, regardless of his political record. There are many possible culprits.

Nemtsov’s enemies were legion: aside from Putin and his supporters, there are the more extreme nationalists who think Putin is a sell-out.

Nemtsov’s open support for the Ukrainian government against his own country generated the kind of hatred antiwar activists had to endure during the Vietnam war: think Jane Fonda upon her return from Hanoi.

Perhaps a bit more lethal are the oligarchs threatened by Nemtsov’s reform program – a series of “anti-corruption” measures ultimately aborted by his mentor, Boris Yeltsin.